The Chicago Cubs announced one of their most important offseason decisions Monday, naming John Steinmiller, formerly with the Blackhawks, as their new senior director of media relations.

It’s not exactly bringing back Cody Bellinger, but it’s newsworthy, and that counts for something during this Cubs offseason, where President Jed Hoyer has been biding his time while waiting for the prices of free agents to drop.

At least the Rickettses aren’t messing around in this key position, which serves as the bridge between the local media and manager Craig Counsell and his players.

Steinmiller, who replaces veteran Jason Carr, has been in the business since 2005 when he began with the Milwaukee Brewers. His relationship with Counsell should serve him well, and he has a familiarity with most of the Chicago media, including me.

Steinmiller still took the job, which is commendable.

There may be no more thankless job than that of media relations for a professional sports team, especially a major market team like the Cubs. You’re dealing with managers who might be in a cranky mood after a crushing loss, players who decide to leave the clubhouse without talking to the media after hitting a game-winning home run, and writers constantly asking: “Is Jed talking today?”

The relationship between the media and athletes has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, with less access for reporters, fewer stars who feel the need to talk before or after games, and front-office executives who only deal with national writers at the expense of their beat writers.

The main responsibility of a media relations boss is to make sure the team always comes out in the best light, or if it’s a particularly controversial news story to perform some damage control. Steinmiller should be well-prepared after working for the Blackhawks, where damage control has become an art form in the last few years.

The last time I saw Steinmiller at a Blackhawks game, I accidentally stepped on the Blackhawks logo in the postgame locker room, which drew a much-deserved reprimand from one of his media relations assistants: “Hey, get off the logo!” Instead of a lifetime ban, I got off with a warning to watch my step.

Everyone deserves a second chance, though I’ve avoided the Blackhawks locker room since. Fortunately, the floor of the Cubs’ clubhouse is simply a weathered carpet without any logo, so there will be no worries about a repeat offense unless stepping on Clark the Cub counts.

Steinmiller also reminded me that day of the time I wrote in the Chicago Tribune that Counsell was “tragically unhip,” apparently making fun of the new Cubs manager back when he was running the Brewers. I couldn’t remember writing anything like that, but a quick Google search revealed Steinmiller’s memory was accurate.

While writing a Cubs-Brewers series preview in August 2018, I wrote of the competing managers: ”Hipster Joe Maddon matches wits with the tragically unhip Craig Counsell.” Oof. I have no reason to believe Counsell is unhip, tragically or otherwise. The Tribune regrets the error.

Counsell has been around for a long time. He probably doesn’t need any assistance from Steinmiller on how to deal with the Chicago baseball media, which is much larger — and a bit snarkier — than our peers in Milwaukee, except for the Marquee Sports Network, the Cubs-owned outlet that treated former manager David Ross like he was part of the network and thus blameless during the team’s end-of-season collapse.

Hoyer obviously saw otherwise and made the right call on replacing Ross with Counsell, whose $40 million contract is the largest of any manager in MLB history.

Counsell seems to have a quirky sense of humor, which will likely be necessary as he begins the long grind when spring training starts in two weeks in Mesa, Ariz. As former manager Lou Piniella said in spring training 2007: “This is no push-button operation, I can tell you that.”

After an uneventful start to the offseason, the Cubs have made a couple of big moves since the calendar turned, signing Japanese starter Shota Imanaga and reliever Héctor Neris. Everyone still expects Hoyer to re-sign Bellinger, but until he’s in camp it’s mere guesswork.

“Anyone can do a deal,” Hoyer told fans at the Cubs Convention. “Anyone can say yes to an agent’s asking price. If you do that, you’re going to run out of money really quickly.”

I doubt the Rickettses will ever run out of money, no matter how much they give Bellinger or anyone else. But if Hoyer signs Bellinger at a bargain price, his strategy will have worked and most fans will be satisfied. If Bellinger signs elsewhere, the Cubs could be looking at another 80-win season.

Everything really hinges on one decision.

The 2024 season is almost here, but there’s still time to make a move or two. Hopefully Hoyer gives his new media relations director something to do as Steinmiller begins his new job on Feb. 5.

Those press releases don’t write themselves.

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In a political stampede Wednesday, the House overwhelmingly approved a bill that would force the social media app TikTok to be divested from China-based owner ByteDance, or face banning. The Senate should have more sense and slow this down.

If the concern is that TikTok might become rife with propaganda, disinformation or anti-democratic junk, and the expectation is that this will be ameliorated by sale to a U.S. entity, we have some bad news. The site once known as Twitter has plunged into much of the same muck since its purchase by American billionaire and noted narcissist Elon Musk, who got rid of a huge swath of the trust and safety team and has dedicated himself to pushing racist great replacement garbage, jetted to the top of users’ feeds by an algorithm tailored to uplift his posts.

If what lawmakers fear is that enormous volumes of user data, particularly on youngsters, will be siphoned off, stored, sold off to third parties, used for marketing and political targeting and fed into AI training algorithms, then we agree wholeheartedly with that apprehensiveness.

That’s why they should commit to making up for lost time and start looking at an industry that has been allowed to grow over the last three decades into a series of dominant monopolies with little in the way of oversight or guardrails — not just ByteDance, but Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube; Apple, with its cornering of the devices market and iron grip on its app store; and so on.

Go ahead, block rampant data collection and force transparency for opaque internal processes that affect billions of people. You don’t like governments being able to utilize data from social media apps to override civil liberties? Great, stop the NSA and other federal, state and local law enforcement from simply buying up personal data that they would otherwise need a warrant for.

Better yet, stop the widespread purchase, bundling and third party sale of granular personal data in the first place. Foster competition in an industry that fancies itself a hub of innovation but has descended into startups burning through venture cash until the exit plan of being bought by one of the tech giants. Show companies that they can’t run roughshod over regulations — that the days of Uber and Airbnb openly flouting laws with little consequence are over.

If lawmakers refuse to move on any of this, then perhaps it’s an indication that TikTok is an easy scapegoat because of its Beijing ownership. The Chinese Communist Party does try to interfere with U.S. elections, in violation of American law. But the Politburo doesn’t need to own the app for that mischief.

Indeed, despite the months of innuendo, lawmakers have yet to present any concrete evidence that TikTok has been used nefariously by the Chinese government, at least any more so than its U.S.-based competitors like Twitter, which was the locus of a massive disinformation campaign by Xi Jinping’s government.

Maybe this equivocating is a marker of what the tech industry’s gargantuan lobbying campaigns have bought — an eye-watering $70 million on Congress alone as of 2022, outstripping stalwarts like oil and pharmaceuticals, without even counting surging state-level lobbying expenditures. For shame.

— The New York Daily News

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Transportation and anti-poverty advocates are pushing the Adams administration to provide an extra $55 million in the next budget to expand the Fair Fares program—through which low-income New Yorkers can qualify for half-priced MetroCards—to include people earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $60,000 for a four-person household.

Marc A. Hermann / MTA

Subway riders entering the system at the Roosevelt Avenue-Jackson Heights station on Wednesday, Jul 26, 2023.

Last year, nearly one in five New Yorkers said they struggled to afford subway or bus costs, according to the results of a survey released Thursday—what transit and anti-poverty advocates say underscores the city’s need to expand its discount fares program.

Nonprofit Community Service Society (a City Limits’ funder) saw 19 percent of respondents to its 2023 “Unheard Third” survey report hardships in covering their transit costs, up from 14 percent in the same survey in 2021 and 18 percent in 2022. The survey, conducted by phone, canvassed 1,113 low- income residents and 645 moderate and higher-income residents across the city.

More moderate- and high-income residents last year—21 and 10 percent, respectively—said they also struggled to afford the subway or bus, greater than in previous years, the report found. The survey was conducted before the MTA’s latest fare increase in August 2023, when the cost of a ride went from $2.75 to $2.90.

“We are expecting to see even higher rates of transit hardship” this year, said Debipriya Chatterjee, a senior economist with the Community Service Society (CSS). She attributed the increased difficulties in 2023 to a number of factors: the drying up of pandemic-era aid and benefits, inflation and rising living costs, and more New Yorkers returning to in-person work that requires commuting.

CSS and other advocates are pressing the city to expand its Fair Fares program, which offers half-priced MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers. Last year, the city invested an additional $20 million to expand eligibility for the discount, which is open to applicants who earn at or below 120 percent of the federal poverty level (up to $37,440 a year for a family of four, or $18,072 for individual).

But that still locks out a swath of residents who struggle to pay for transit, advocates say, including minimum-wage earners. CSS estimates it would cost the city an additional $55 million, on top of the program’s current baseline budget of $95 million a year, to include residents earning up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($62,400 a year for a four-person household, or $30,120 a year for one person).

In her State of the City address this week, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams included that among her budget priorities this year. “Better access to Fair Fares is needed to ensure it reaches New Yorkers who need support,” she said, “so that more people can access our public transit system to unlock opportunity.”

Reached for comment, City Hall did not directly address the calls to expand the program but provided a statement from Mayor Eric Adams. “We look forward to digging into the speaker’s proposals and continuing to build on two years of collaboration with her and the City Council to deliver on our shared goals,” he said.

State lawmakers also support a Fair Fares expansion: in budget proposals released this week, the Assembly called for adding $127.5 million to Albany’s next spending plan—due April 1—to extend eligibility to those earning 200 percent of the federal poverty level; the Senate proposed expanding the discounts to rides on commuter rail lines within the city.

Inability to afford subway and bus fare can have broader consequences for residents than just a missed ride.

“What we saw was folks saying that they have missed showing up for education and training, job interviews, medical appointments,” said Chatterjee. “And needless to say, any and all recreational meetings, like with family or friends or to museums—basically, what you would expect with restricted mobility.”

Transit costs hit certain populations harder than others, CSS’s survey found. More than a third of low-income working mothers who took part in the questionnaire reported struggling to pay for fares, while 37 percent of low-income Latino respondents did, higher than their Black, Asian or white counterparts.

In addition to expanding elgibility, CSS calls for the city to do more to spread awareness of Fair Fares. While participation nearly doubled between 2020 and 2023, and includes about 320,000 people currently, that’s still a only a fraction of those eligible.

The mayor’s office said it will continue to build on its outreach efforts: via social media campaigns to reach specific zip codes, trainings with community groups to help spread the word about eligibility and by sharing information with food pantries and houses of worship, a spokesperson said.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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